11.1.09

Snips

Geno’s Paradox entails that apart from carrier screening, personal genomics will be more recreational than diagnostic for some time to come. Some reasons are technological. The affordable genotyping services don’t actually sequence your entire genome but follow the time-honored scientific practice of looking for one’s keys under the lamppost because that’s where the light is best. -- Many of the dystopian fears raised by personal genomics are simply out of touch with the complex and probabilistic nature of genes. Forget about the hyperparents who want to implant math genes in their unborn children, the “Gattaca” corporations that scan people’s DNA to assign them to castes, the employers or suitors who hack into your genome to find out what kind of worker or spouse you’d make. Let them try; they’d be wasting their time. -- The fallacy is not in thinking that the entire genome matters, but in thinking that an individual gene will matter, at least in a way that is large and intelligible enough for us to care about.

A combination of drugs could trick the body into sending its repair mechanisms into overdrive, say scientists. -- The bone marrow of treated mice released 100 times as many stem cells - which help to regenerate tissue.